Gettysburg at 150: Illinois units played role in famous battle

Sunday

Jun 30, 2013 at 12:01 AMJun 30, 2013 at 4:18 PM

Steven Corey has gotten a tingle, that rush of emotion when he has been to some Civil War battlefields, but even he doesn’t know what to expect when he and thousands of other re-enactors head to Gettysburg, Pa., this week for the 150th anniversary of the epic battle.

INSIDE: On the Confederate side

Andy Kravetz

Steven Corey has gotten a tingle, that rush of emotion when he has been to some Civil War battlefields, but even he doesn’t know what to expect when he and thousands of other re-enactors head to Gettysburg, Pa., this week for the 150th anniversary of the epic battle.

It’s not uncommon for a re-enactor to get emotional while portraying a tilt like Gettysburg, but for this former Lake County man who lives in College Station, Texas, this year’s re-creation has even more meaning.

“On the first day of the event is the cavalry battle, and during that I am going to be falling in with the 8th Illinois Cavalry and portray my great-grandfather,” said Corey, 58.

“It’s rare when a re-enactor gets to do that kind of thing. Some people join a specific unit because they have an ancestor there. It’s a double dose of history and awe-inspiring.”

Corey’s great-grandfather, Pvt. John Williams, was 40 when he enlisted in the 8th Illinois, which, with the 12th Illinois Cavalry and the 82nd Illinois Infantry, were the state’s contributions to the battle. Most of Illinois’ soldiers were hundreds of miles away at the Battle of Vicksburg, which was going on simultaneously with Gettysburg.

Mark DePue, oral history director at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, said Lincoln’s home state contributed about 259,000 soldiers to the Union army, the fourth-largest total by any northern state. Most of those troops, DePue said, fought on the western edge of the war, participating in battles in Tennessee and Mississippi.

Illinois accounted for up to a fourth of the troops at the Battle of Vicksburg that ended on July 4, 1863, one day after Gettysburg.

That doesn’t mean Illinois wasn’t well-represented there: the 8th and 12th Illinois were among the first to engage the Confederate forces and played an important role in how the battle would evolve.

“They were involved in the opening stages, which determined it would be at this obscure crossroads in southwestern Pennsylvania that the battle would be fought,” DePue said.

First shot fired
Mark Johnson of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency said it appears that those two cavalry units and the 82nd Infantry, about 1,000 troops, were assigned to the Eastern theater, based upon the army’s needs then.

The 8th Illinois arrived a day before. The regiment, assigned to Brig. Gen. John Buford’s division, was positioned northwest of town. While smaller in number than an infantry unit, the horse troopers had repeating carbines and served as scouts.

“The cavalry in this war would play the role of reconnaissance and intelligence gathering. They would position between the infantry and the enemy, but they weren’t the type to sit down and slug it out,” DePue said.

About 700 Illinois troopers were among Buford’s division. One of those, Lt. Marcellus E. Jones of DuPage County, made history as the person widely believed to have fired the first shot of the battle.

Jones and a very small group of men had formed a picket line — or sentry points — a few hundred yards in front of the Union forces that had massed near McPherson Ridge. He noticed dust along the road, borrowed a corporal’s carbine and fired a single shot at the dust cloud. The Confederates hadn’t planned on fighting at that moment, but with the two armies “bumping” into each other, the battle was joined.

The 300 or so soldiers with the 82nd Illinois Infantry were made up of men from throughout Illinois. Most were of German or Jewish descent. And, Johnson said, the men were eager for battle, having been part of the disastrous Battle of Chancellorsville. Their reputation tarnished, Johnson and DePue said, members of the 82nd sought to redeem themselves.

But on the first day of battle, they, along with XI Corps to which they were assigned, were routed by Confederate forces. They retreated through town and made their way to Cemetery Hill south of town, one of the highest points on the battlefield.

Over the next two days, they defended the western side of Cemetery Hill. The infamous Pickett’s Charge occurred just south of the 82nd Illinois’ position. DePue said it appears that they had no part in that action.

Four men of the 82nd were killed and 19 wounded in the battle. Nearly 90 were captured during the first day’s disorganized retreat. The 8th Illinois lost one man and had five wounded. The 12th had four killed and 10 wounded.

Transported back
After the war, Capt. Joseph Greenhut, a Peorian who served with the 82nd Infantry, was one of three men who commissioned a monument for all the state’s soldiers at the battlefield. The Austrian immigrant made his fortune after the war on whiskey and helped pay for the Civil War Memorial at the Peoria County Courthouse and the Grand Army of the Republic hall, also in downtown Peoria.

“Greenhut founded and was president of the Distillers & Cattle Feeders Co., which was also called ‘cattle trust’,” according to HistoricIllinois.com. “This organization united all distillers and controlled the United States’ production and value of whiskey.”

Corey expects his visit to the historic site to be emotional. His great-grandfather was shot in the left arm and lost that limb later.

“To stand there, firing a weapon, it’ll be like I’ll be transported back 150 years,” he said. “Other members (of his re-enacting group) have wished me luck and told me how lucky I am.”

But he’s quick to point out that it’s not just about remembering loved ones but all those who were involved, so the horrors of battle aren’t forgotten.

Andy Kravetz: 309-686-3283; akravetz@pjstar.com

On the Confederate side
Many Confederate Civil War officers had West Point training, including Maj. Gen. George Pickett, whose name is associated with the failed Confederate assault on the last day of battle at Gettysburg — “Pickett’s Charge.”
But Pickett, pointed out historian Tom Emery of Carlinville, also had an Illinois connection.
The Virginia-born Pickett spent his teen years in Quincy with an uncle who was an influential newspaper editor and through whom Pickett gained a West Point appointment from U.S. Congressman John Stuart, a Lincoln law partner.
Some sources claim — wrongly, Emery said — that it was Abraham Lincoln who shepherded the appointment.